


Cools like the Rain

by Barkour



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-01
Updated: 2013-03-01
Packaged: 2017-12-03 23:20:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bart bleeds out in the sand. Jaime is his only hope of rescue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cools like the Rain

**Author's Note:**

> I don't believe the violence is too graphic, but I figured better safe than sorry. For those worried about the nature of the violence, please refer to the end notes.

Oh, the world shakes! The air is smoke, the sun a cinder. This is the end, Bart thinks. He thinks it like this: Earth is a rubber ball that he bounces and bounces, till the ball is glass and it hits the wall and shatters. 

Planes fly by. He watches them go. They’re very slow. A very sharp pain runs through him, but it only hurts him when he breathes. He tries not to breathe. His eyes are wet. He closes them.

This isn’t the end of the world. It can’t be. The end of the world was last year, but it didn’t happen then. Maybe it got rescheduled. Time is like that. A strange thing. His mouth is dry. His tongue sticks to his teeth. He wishes his chest didn’t hurt.

Hands glide down his face. The fingers are so very smooth. He pulls away, but that hurts, too. Bart coughs. Blood comes up. He’s startled to see it: where did that come from? It stains the sand in red globs.

“Ay dios mio. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.” 

The hands are at his chest. They push down; they push down. Something hot bursts inside Bart, like a glass ball bursting. He tears at the hands. He tears at the arms holding him there. A face looks down on him.

Blue Beetle. Blue Beetle pushes him into the sand. Blue Beetle is _ripping out his heart, crushing his throat, exterminating the meat, slave_ — Bart came back and the world went on and now he has no purpose, he is _extraneous, inefficient, a waste of resources, slave_ —

“Let go,” Bart says, “let-go-let-go-let-go—”

He can’t vibrate. His chest hurts; he hurts; blood stings his mouth.

Blue Beetle’s hands move over his chest. “No te muevas—hermano, please, you’re bleeding out—”

Bart clutches for the Beetle’s shoulders. His hands miss. He catches air. Blue Beetle spares a hand to catch Bart’s, falling away.

“Jaime?”

There’s a face behind the mask. Bart remembers. A boy with black hair and dark eyes and brown skin and high cheeks. A boy who smiles at him.

“It’s me,” says Jaime, “it’s me, I’m right here. Can you look at me? Can you see me?”

“Yeah,” says Bart. The mask—he knows the mask. This is Jaime, too. That’s his mouth. “I don’t know why you’re moving around so much.”

Jaime squeezes his hand tightly. Bart feels that run up his arm, all the way up to his shoulder.

“Am I squeezing your hand?”

“Yeah,” Bart complains, “like you’re trying to yank my arm off,” and he’d pull away but his arm hurts, oh, it hurts. He doesn’t want to move. He doesn’t want to breathe.

“Okay,” says Jaime. The hand at Bart’s breast flutters, skating low and around something, around the place in Bart’s side where it hurts most of all. “Okay. Okay. Bart, I need you to stay calm, okay, I’m going to try—I’m going to try something, all right, so don’t freak out, te comprendo?”

“I’m crash,” says Bart. 

He’s thinking of Jaime’s hair under that helmet. Does he get sweaty under there? Sometimes Bart has burns on the insides of his thighs from sweating and running, salt scraping his skin dry. Jaime has short, short hair. It’d stick right up if he sweated. Bart imagines running his fingers through Jaime’s hair, pulling it up into spikes. Smoke eats up the sun. Bart smiles at it.

Jaime touches his fingertips to his own forehead. “I need something to close it up, so I can get him back without—I don’t know, I don’t—something to cauterize it. Stop the bleeding. Can you make a painkiller? Like morphine, or— Sí, sí, just do it!”

There’s a whirring, a soft clunk-clunk. Jaime rips at Bart’s suit, peeling the reinforced fabric blend free of his arm. In Bart’s head, he’s kissing the freckles hidden in the dip of Jaime’s clavicle. The first freckle is thank you, the second kiss is I’m glad I met you, the third kiss is I wish I could have saved you sooner, and the fourth kiss— 

The fourth kiss is a bite into the skin on the inside of Bart’s right elbow. The needle slips right in. The scream comes from somewhere in Bart’s gut—he tries to curl—but the cry seizes up in his throat. Pain like a scattering star erupts in his side, born of the convulsion.

“I’m sorry,” Blue Beetle is saying, “Bart, you gotta stay still—” His voice hitches. It breaks, too.

And the smoke is black in the sky, and there is ash raining down so gently, and nothing has changed, nothing has changed—did he take the machine? Blue Beetle looms over him. Blue Beetle is killing him. No, Bart thinks, no, no— Not Jaime—

Then the morphine hits. Heat shoots through Bart. There’s an itching in his arm, then that burns away, too. Bart’s eyelids shiver. All of him shivers. He sighs.

Fire catches his attention. Jaime is pressing his hand—only it isn’t a hand, but a torch—to Bart’s torn-up gut. The pain is there, but distant, very distant, a friend separated by long and cold reaches of space. That’s Bart’s blood in the sand. Those are his intestines in his side, somewhere in all that blood. His skin is already growing back together, but it’s doing it all wrong. Jaime pins the two lengths together and melts them, fusing the flesh in a ragged seam.

“I thought my guts were blue,” Bart says dreamily.

“It’s oxygenated,” Jaime grits. His eyes glow hotly. He doesn’t blink. His teeth flash, pressed tight together, and the light thrown up by the torch brings out deep colors from his suit. “The hemoglobin changes shape when it’s exposed to the air, so when it changes shape, it absorbs another color from the light spectrum.”

Bart nods. He tries to nod. His head is very heavy. He wonders if the blood in his mouth is red, too, or if it’s blue and only when he opens his mouth will it change color.

“You’re some kind of—technical genius, right?” Jaime’s fingers press into Bart’s side. They slick through blood. “Shouldn’t you know this?”

“Neutron built most of it,” Bart mumbles. Jaime’s hand is so cool on his belly. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thinks, if Jaime rubbed his belly for him till all the heat went away and Bart could sleep? “I just did the programming stuff…” He struggles to open his eyes again. “And technical, not—not—what Wally does.”

“Yeah? What’s Wally do?”

Jaime’s voice is low; it rasps. Bart smiles, listening to it.

“He’s a chemist,” says Bart. On the backs of his eyelids a movie plays, a black and white reel like on that channel Aunt Joan loves: Jaime in a tuxedo and Bart with a cane, and they’re tap dancing together across a stage. “I don’t want to be a chemist. Wally can be a chemist but I don’t wanna be one.”

“What do you wanna do?”

“I don’t know,” says Bart.

“I want to be a doctor,” says Jaime. He’s near the end of the rip now. “You know, so I can help people. And I want to earn some money, too, to help put my baby sister through school.”

“Helping people sounds crash,” Bart says. “Maybe that’s what I’ll do. I’ll just save people.”

“You wanna be Impulse all day, every day of the week?” 

That’s Jaime’s hand, steady on Bart’s chest.

“I guess,” says Bart. In the movie, now Jaime’s a doctor and he’s tying a bag full of ice on top of Bart’s head. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“That’s okay,” says Jaime, and his voice is shaking, but the hand resting on Bart’s chest does not. The distant burning fades. The morphine’s fading, too. Bart frowns.

“You’re gonna have a lot of time to think about it,” Jaime continues. “I’m picking you up now. All right? We’re gonna fly back to the recon point and radio for evac. You gonna stay with me?”

Jaime slides his arm under Bart, and Bart arches away from the touch. The pain is returning, and his teeth ache with the breadth of it. But Jaime folds his arm around Bart’s back and hooks his right arm under Bart’s knees. He stands. The sand falls away, soaked with blood. Bart’s head is filled with air. He’s floating up, up.

The smoke clears. And there’s sky there above them, blue sky, and a sun that shines clear and strong. Bart blinks at it and turns his face away, to Jaime’s cold, metal breast.

“You still with me?”

Bart feels up Jaime’s arm to his shoulder. His fingers dig in, not well, but enough. There’s a thrumming in the air like the pounding of a heart: Jaime’s wings, blurring as he drives them on.

“Still here,” Bart says. But his eyes sting. His head aches, too light and too heavy all at once. There’s a jagged, pulsing pain in his folded up gut that won’t go away, and Jaime is cool and hard with metal and, he thinks, and—

From very far away Jaime says, “Bart, stay with me—Bart, I need you to stay with me, I need you—”

Bart sleeps.

*

*

*

He comes to in a bright room. There’s a machine by his head that beeps and beeps, a long window looking out onto a hall he recognizes as one on the Watchtower, and beside his bed, Jaime. Just Jaime. Jaime’s elbows are set on the bed and his palms are turned up and his face turned down so the heels of his hands press against his eyes.

“What’s wrong with you?” asks Bart.

Jaime starts. His eyes are red. Smoke, probably.

“You’re awake,” he says.

Bart tugs at the IV line. “What’s this for?” The skin at his elbow where the needle is taped in place is irritated and flushed. His body is trying to heal through the needle.

“Ese,” says Jaime, leaning forward, “you almost died.”

“Oh,” says Bart. He lets the IV line go. “How did that happen? How’d they even catch me?” He starts feeling at his face, his neck, hunting for any trace of an inhibitor collar, or some kind of—

Jaime is glaring at Bart. Really intense, too, like y-i-k-e-s. Did Bart steal his Chicken Whizees again? He can’t remember.

Very calmly, Jaime says, “ _You_ pushed _me_ out of the way of a high-powered _laser_ from _Apokolips_.” His lips flare.

“I did?” 

Bart thinks. He has an odd memory of dancing; then, before that, a memory of sand and of fire ripping through him and of Blue Beetle’s hand stretched out toward him.

“Oh,” says Bart again.

Jaime’s fingers are fisted tightly in the sheets. His knuckles stick out.

“That was pretty crash of me,” Bart says. “I guess you owe me one.”

“What the hell were you thinking?” Jaime shouts. “Eres tonto? I got armor, I got the scarab—”

“I’m not stupid,” Bart shouts back. It stings—he’s heard it before, he hears it a lot, all the time, Bart, slow down, Bart, think, Bart, don’t be stupid—but not from Jaime. Not Jaime. “Apokolips tech does something viral to your armor—”

“At least I have armor!” Jaime tosses his arms wide. “I can take a hit! You can’t!”

“Well, I did!” 

Bart sits back, crosses his arms—and there’s a twinge in his side, some echo running up his back. He touches his gut. Even through the hospital gown—standard issue—he can feel the scar tissue. Bart pulls the shirt up, and there’s a swath of thick, red flesh going from his navel down his side and around. He’s never had a scar before.

Jaime looks down. “I did the best I could.”

Bart swallows. Jaime’s mouth creases. His brow is heavy.

“Sorry I freaked you out,” Bart says. He reaches for Jaime’s hand, still fisted in the sheets.

Jaime turns, and his hand opens slowly under Bart’s.

“I’m sorry, too,” Jaime says, to Bart’s hand. “For yelling at you for saving my life.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t crash of you.” Bart traces the side of Jaime’s hand with his thumb. “But since you kind of saved my life, too, I guess that makes us oblong.”

Jaime’s mouth flicks up. “Square.”

“Whatever,” says Bart.

Jaime’s hands are chilled. It’s the room, Bart figures; they keep the rooms so cold, plus it’s in space, so maybe that does something, too. But it’s nice, he thinks. He likes it, how cool Jaime’s fingers are as they spread along the back of Bart’s hand.

“I don’t want you to keep sacrificing yourself for me,” Jaime says quietly. “It’s okay to live.”

Bart sits up at this. He leans forward, against the tensing in his gut.

“I don’t want to die,” Bart protests. “Living is like the coolest thing! But—”

Jaime looks up at him. Jaime—Jaime with his hair sticking up in sweat-dried spikes. Jaime, his dark with thickening stubble. Jaime dances like Fred Astaire through Bart’s brain, toe-tapping down Bart’s vertebra like the steps in a grand ballroom, all the way to the base of his spine where Jaime itches at him, itches and _itches_ at him, worse even than the needle in Bart’s arm.

“I don’t want you to die either,” Bart says.

He wonders that he knows Jaime’s face so well. He wonders that he hadn’t known Jaime’s face before. All those years he’d feared Blue Beetle, and Jaime had been dying in there. And now Jaime is alive and holding Bart’s hand and looking at Bart as if he, too, wonders.

“I thought you were going to die,” Jaime says softly. “That entire time, flying back—I thought you were gonna die. Because of me.”

Bart shakes his head. “Not because of me—it’s not your fault. It wouldn’t have been your fault. You didn’t make me do it—”

“Hermano,” says Jaime, “nobody can make you do anything,” and then Jaime laughs, and Bart—Bart laughs, too, because it’s true, and because Jaime is laughing, even if it does catch in his throat and come out hoarse.

“Thank you,” says Bart. He clings tightly to Jaime’s hand. “For saving my life.”

“Why do you gotta be so fast all the time?” Jaime asks. The smile lingers. “I think I’m the one who has to be thanking you. Yes, you too—”

And it’s strange, that Bart should say, “Um. Thank you, too, scarab guy,” but he does say it. There’s a little tightness in his chest when he thinks it, but it eases soon enough.

“It says, you’re welcome,” says Jaime.

Bart flexes his hand around Jaime’s hand, feeling his palm, his wrist. The tendons in Jaime’s arm tense; his wrist goes taut then bends.

“What,” Bart starts.

Then Jaime, leaning in, kisses him. Jaime’s mouth is dry, but his lips are soft and cool. Stubble scratches Bart’s chin. Bart’s heart goes thump-thump-thump.

Jaime leans back, just a little. Not far at all. His face tips down, but his eyes are on Bart.

“That was from me,” he says. “Not Khaji Da. If you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t wondering,” Bart says.

“Sorry,” says Jaime. He goes to pull his hand away.

“Wait!” Bart says. He lunges for Jaime. There’s a pain in his side—a flare sticking like a pin into his gut—the IV pole skitters and what does he care, that stuff’s a pain anyway—but then his hands are on Jaime’s face and his mouth is on Jaime’s mouth, and it’s like one of Aunt Joan’s movies: they’re motionless, they breathe in that stillness, then they bend and Jaime’s hand is between Bart’s shoulders and Bart’s fingers are in Jaime’s hair and Jaime turns his head to press closer and Bart kisses him again, again, again. 

And Bart thinks—he’s been burning all this time, Bart’s a fire in a hot place, he’s on fire, and Jaime is the rain. Jaime reaches out for Bart and pulls him in, and Jaime is cool and soft and sweet, and the fire goes out, the whole thing goes out, and Bart’s there, he’s here, and Jaime is smiling against his mouth and Bart is smiling back because he’s alive. They’re alive.

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warning: There is a significant wound to the abdomen that is described briefly, though not in detail.
> 
> (If you're concerned for any other spoilers, please don't read the rest of these notes.)
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> (Sorry for all the asterisks - trying to make a spoiler space!)
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> The title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, poem 715 (c. 1863):
>
>>   
> The World—feels Dusty  
> When We stop to Die—  
> We want the Dew— then—  
> Honors— taste dry—
>> 
>> Flags— vex a Dying face—  
> But the least Fan  
> Stirred by a friend's Hand—  
> Cools— like the Rain—
>> 
>> Mine be the Ministry  
> When thy Thirst comes—  
> And Hybla Balms—  
> Dews of Thessaly, to fetch—  
> 
> 
> Bart lives so it isn't entirely apropos, but nevertheless. Inspiration comes from whence it comes.
> 
> This is set one year after the Reach invasion, as noted by Bart. In three episodes, we'll know if I was off the mark on a few things. For those coming to this fic after the season's finished: forgive me! I knew nothing!


End file.
